Vincent Canby

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The New York Times
For 925 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Vincent Canby's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Victor Victoria
Lowest review score: 0 Revolution
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 405 out of 925
  2. Mixed: 405 out of 925
  3. Negative: 115 out of 925
925 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    The Sterile Cuckoo
    Quite clearly, Pookie Adams is a marvelous role, full of tough-sweet humor, and Liza Minnelli, the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and the late Judy Garland, turns it into one of the most appealing performances of the season, a triumph limited only by the squashy movie that encases it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Escape to Witch Mountain
    Escape to Witch Mountain is a Walt Disney production for children who will watch absolutely anything that moves...It's not very scary, but neither is it very exciting.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Back Roads
    Less a movie than an extended sketch, and it's to the credit of Mr. Ritt, his stars and Gary Devore, the screenwriter, that the movie is so much fun, even given its occasional soggy patches.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    The Ice Pirates
    A busy, bewildering, exceedingly jokey science-fiction film that looks like a Star Wars spinoff made in an underdeveloped galaxy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Série Noire
    Serie Noire,' adapted by Mr. Corneau and Georges Perec from ''A Hell of a Woman'' by the late Jim Thompson, takes itself much too seriously, as is the way with humorless French adapters of American fiction of this sort.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    The Mosquito Coast
    In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Modern Problems
    TWENTIETH Century-Fox knew exactly what it was doing when it decided to open Modern Problems at theaters all over New York on Christmas Day, without advance screenings for the press. It's not that Modern Problems is so bad, though it is incredibly sloppy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Koyaanisqatsi
    Koyaanisqatsi is an oddball and - if one is willing to put up with a certain amount of solemn picturesqueness - entertaining trip.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    The Frisco Kid
    There's no shortage of talent in The Frisco Kid, but it's the wrong talent for the wrong material.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Rough Cut
    To watch it is to try to put together the pieces from three different jigsaw puzzles. Not everything fits. [19 June 1980, p.19]
    • The New York Times
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Vincent Canby
    Death Wish II
    Even more foolish, more tacky and more self righteously inhumane than the 1974 melodrama off which it has been spun by the none-too-nimble fingers of Michael Winner, who directed the original film.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Deliverance
    An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    The Strongest Man in the World
    A Walt Disney comedy based on the old magic-formula story that's served the company well through thick (The Absent-Minded Professor) and thin (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes). The new film, which opened at theaters throughout the city yesterday, is nowhere near as funny as the first but a lot better than the second.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Paradise Alley
    A phony, attitudinizing, self-indulgent mess, a multimillion-dollar B (for boring) picture with the ear of a cauliflower, the heart of a hustler and the soul of a used-car salesman.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Howling
    It's also one of those movies that is itself so lethargic that one welcomes its so-called shock moments not because they are scary but because they indicate that not everyone behind the camera has been napping. You don't dread the possibility of something jumping out from behind the door. You long for it.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Moonraker
    Moonraker begins with one of the funniest and most dangerous (as well as most beautifully photographed and edited) sequences Bond has ever faced.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Day of the Dolphin
    The Day of the Dolphin is not a movie with much personality of its own.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    Miss Keaton, who continues to grow as an actress and film presence, is worth paying attention to in bits and pieces of the movie. She's too good to waste on the sort of material the movie provides, which is artificial without in anyway qualifying as a miracle fabric.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Over the Edge
    A lot of Over the Edge is awkwardly acted and motivated, but it is staged with such vivid efficiency and concern that, as you watch it, you are frequently caught halfway between a giggle and a gasp.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Clash of the Titans
    Clash of the Titans is profligate in its use of talented people who are not particularly at home in this sort of film, though they all pay serious attention to their work.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    A Few Good Men
    A big commercial entertainment of unusually satisfying order. [11 Dec 1992]
    • The New York Times
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Pale Rider
    This veteran movie icon handles both jobs with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    The Eagle Has Landed
    A good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Barfly
    Though it's set within the world of the seriously down-and-out in Los Angeles and is about people who are at the end of their ropes, Barfly somehow manages to be gallant and even cheerful. It has an admirably lean, unsentimental screenplay by Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of America's misbegotten.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Winter Kills
    Don't go to Winter Kills looking for some solemn explanation of the way things are or of how they got this way, or even of what happens in the film itself. It's a comedy, logical response to our times, a film whose reality depends on one's willingness to go along with the uproarious imaginations of Mr. Richert and Mr. Condon.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's fine second film, The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry's novel by McMurtry and Bogdanovich, has the effect of a lovely, leisurely, horizontal pan-shot across the life of Anarene, Tex., a small, shabby town on a plain so flat that to raise the eye even 10 degrees would be to see only an endless sky.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Scarecrow
    It all goes decisively wrong when Jerry Schatzberg, the director, and Garry Michael White, who wrote the screenplay, decide to saddle the pair with a poetic vision that suddenly makes everything needlessly phony.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    El Norte
    Not exactly a great film, but it's a very good one that, through the devices of fiction, manages to provoke a number of healthily contradictory feelings about the world we all inhabit at the moment.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Something Wild
    Something Wild is often "Something Wrong."
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Return of Swamp Thing
    The movie is based on characters that originally appeared in DC Comics, and means to be funnier than it ever is. It almost achieves its comic goal in one scene in which Swamp Thing and Heather Locklear, as Mr. Jourdan's innocent stepdaughter, attempt to consummate a love that cannot be. The film is otherwise composed entirely of special effects that alternate with whimsy.
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